


Suicide is a Pastime (Trapped on the Devil's Highway)

by Saral_Hylor



Series: 25 Seconds 'verse [6]
Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Mortality Challenged Losers, Original Character Death(s), Roque-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-06
Updated: 2014-11-06
Packaged: 2018-02-24 08:41:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2575196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saral_Hylor/pseuds/Saral_Hylor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He left the rest of the team behind after they got Max. It didn't seem like there was any reason to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suicide is a Pastime (Trapped on the Devil's Highway)

**Author's Note:**

> Because I had Roque angsty feels and needed to share them with the world.

The first few months were mostly a blur. Roque didn’t remember a whole lot from the time he had snuck off like a thief in the night; he couldn’t even really remember his reasons. They’d got Max. They’d ended it. They’d even got Jensen back, and he’d been pretty damned sure that wasn’t going to happen. They hadn’t been the same though, after all was said and done; they were never going to go back to how things were before. And it wasn’t just the whole immortality thing.

They were all just so fucking broken.

As people. As a team.

So, he’d left. Probably because it was the only thing he could do.

Maybe because he didn’t want to be around people who he’d betrayed for all the wrong reasons, with all the right intentions. He’d just wanted to go home.

Wanted them all to go home.

He’d left, and crawled right down the neck of the nearest bottle of alcohol and lost himself there. Since, what was the point of having a regenerative liver if you didn’t systematically try to kill it with whatever alcohol you could get your hands on?

It was all a haze of cheap alcohol and, more than likely, cheap women. There were whole sections, days at a time, that he couldn’t account for. He lost count in the end of how many times he might have died. It was hard to determine if it was just a hangover or if he’d died when he woke up countless times slumped in an alleyway stinking of alcohol and piss and feeling like absolute hell.

There were other times when he woke up covered in blood and he knew he had been dead.

It was worse waking up – coming back to life – and being alone.

He tried to clean up after that. Crawl back out of the bottle and head to a different place, somewhere where they didn’t expect him to be dead.

It worked. For a while.

He stayed sober and stayed alive, Moved to Bali under a different name and took a job as a bouncer at one of the tourist night clubs where he dragged plenty of young, reckless and drunk Australians out of the club and sent them back to their hotels.

He ignored the alcohol and ignored the drugs. Ignored people beyond his job and pretended he was okay with being alone.

Then he met her.

She called herself Mel and said she thought he had sad eyes. She looked like a teenager with her freckled skin and feral blonde hair but had an Australian passport that listed her age as twenty six. He thought maybe he was getting to that age where everyone under thirty looked like a kid to him. She smiled at him like he was the sweetest person in the world every time he asked for her ID.

He walked her back to her hotel one night, when her friends moved onto another club and he’d just ended his shift. He ended up in her bed and tried not to think about the years between them while she counted his scars and kissed him like he’d never done anything wrong in his life.

Her friends went home to Australia after a week, but Mel said she wanted to stay, to see more, so she cancelled her flight home and he quit his job and they headed to Jakarta instead, He hadn’t meant to agree to go with her, but Mel, the way she smiled, Roque thought he finally understood why woman always got Clay in so much trouble. But Mel wasn’t volatile like any of Clay’s girls had been. She felt like life, another chance, and he thought maybe that was just what he needed.

He should have known it would never last.

He died again in a bus crash on a freeway out of the capital. He woke up in a city hospital just as they were giving up on him. They couldn’t understand how he was up and walking again so quickly, and he couldn’t understand why for once he hadn't just stayed dead. He would have traded all the lives he had left just to let Mel wake up again.

They kept her on life support until her family came over from Australia to be with her. Her mother and sister looked a lot like her that he had a hard time looking them in the eye when he said he’d been with her at the time. Her father wanted to know how it was that Roque was perfectly fine and he had to take his baby girl home in a pine box. He left after that and reacquainted himself with the bottle because something had to drown out the fact that there were no more smiling kisses that tasted like life or pale fingers tracing his scars.

The bottle wasn't comfort enough one night so he took a knife and carved the words _dalam memori_ into his forearm. For all the people he’d lost. For the children they couldn’t save. For the team he left behind. But most of all for Mel.

He watched the blood flow and then clot. Watched as the skin slowly knit back together until it was seamless, not even new scars left behind. He didn't bother trying to get it tattooed, instead he stitched it into leather, and secured it around his wrist. In the morning he wanted to tear it apart, the crooked stitches testament to how drunk he’d been, but in the end he kept it.

He left Indonesia behind after that and headed to South America again. Something told him he needed to go back.


End file.
